skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I was thinking the same. I never had problems with Silmarillion. Couldn't read Messages from Middle Earth however, that was just not enough connection. But Silmarillion, man, that's an epic collection of stories. I think it might be a cool material for a TV series. Say, one season for every major story with the same characters, plus some creative freedom for the screenwriters of course.

Just think about it - battles with hordes of orks, hero elves AND 30 or so Balrogs. And loosing / winning a battle doesn't just blow up a tower, it creates spasms in damn middle earth. The ring wars got nothing on that..
Really? All of that wordsmithing is saying how he is technically defaulting on the loan from U.S. taxpayers. The loan is now "repay us someday, if you have the cash". Total spin.
UC Online Strives to Compete in an Era of Free Courses
That's a pessimistic way to look at it. You could also look at it as your other departments are average, but your CS department is outstanding. There are a LOT of universities on the list. 193 is not awful.

Also, different lists weight things different. On AWRU outside of CS, your school is in the middle of the top 100, providing more cadence to the not awful theory--just a bad fit for the Times criteria.
Link bait title - the ship was seized in Ghana by a court-ordered injunction. Highly unlikely that the investors walked on the boat.

Nevertheless, really interesting. In general, we expect a debt holder to try to seize assets after the loan defaults. But I've never heard of a private investment group going after a government.

Here is the response from the Argentine government:

The vulture funds have crossed a new limit in their attacks on the Argentine Republic. The Frigate Libertad has been held in the Republic of Ghana over a recourse presented by NML Group before the courts of that country. The Argentine Foreign Ministry has already taken steps with the African nation’s government to clear up the deception that the unscrupulous financiers have mounted. That measure is in violation of the Vienna Convention on diplomatic immunity.

The vulture fund NML has its headquarters in the Cayman Island, a fiscal lair that it’s worth recalling is a colony of Great Britain, from which those who don’t submit themselves to the laws of any jurisdiction operate and they’ve been denounced both by the G-20 and the United Nations.

The NML Group belongs to international speculator Paul Singer and he is the main financier of the lobby that operates in the courts and the Congress of the United States with the name “ATFA” (Task Force Argentina) to damage our country. Also, they disseminate false information for the use of some Argentine monopolistic press media, with the goal of extorting Argentina in order to obtain usurious profits from buying Argentine bonds for pennies during the 2001 crisis and refusing to join the 93% of the investors that agreed to the debt restructuring.

That group of lobbyists are the same that tried to harass the President during her recent trip to the United States passing out aggressive fliers against the presidential investiture. Another of its actions was to place a gigantic rat in the doorway of the Argentine embassy in Washington when the anniversary of our independence was being celebrated.

The Foreign Ministry reiterates that it is the decision of President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner to not bow before the international and local attempts at extortion that have been brought forth by the vulture funds and will continue to denounce them in various forums such as the G-20, the United Nations, CELAC, UNASUR and MERCOSUR, FATF and the other multilateral organizations.
After this, what will be facebook's next target?.. 1.5 bn or 2 bn ... wondering....
Your comment is the reason why I detest the community on HN. If I would have put my personal time into this, and would read such a comment, I would find it extremely demotivating. The solution may not be perfect but it would be much more helpful if you constructive criticism instead of this.
I guess that's the thinking, but there are sizable expat populations in a lot of countries.

For example there are 3 million foreign residents here in Japan, and fully 165% of them have iPhones and 195% of those want train routing apps.*

(*: all figures based on anecdotes and extrapolation)
Scholar on aging argues people can now live to 1,000
The next 1 billion will be really challenging, there are developing countries like Africa, countries where there are conflicts like Afghanistan, and countries like Myanmar where corruptions are really high, where infrastructure such as internet and telcoms are still treated as luxury products, if they can enter those barriers, the impact will be really big. Nevertheless, I salute Mark for getting this far.
I don't know about the apps you're using but I tend to use GoogleEarth more often then GoogleMaps.
I disagree, I think that they are just looking to make an impact on the world.

And how can you make a impact on the world without a shitload of money or knowing someone with a shitload of money?
Works for me on Firefox 15 (linux)
I suspect that the author may have had more luck explaining the difficulty of the Silmarillion if he had compared the number of unique proper nouns. I enjoyed it, but ISTR when I read it (over 30 years ago now) that it did have the feel of a telephone directory.
Additional dimensions of Big Data - discussion revived once more
I've hired about ten people through oDesk; it took about a year before I got good at it (and I wasted a lot of money in doing so) but there are good people there.

As ever, good communication is key (I insist on them being in a campfire room with me whilst working so problems can be dealt with immediately).

EDIT: sorry, just noticed you said "found work", so my answer isn't really relevant.
I do research in this topic. While word level features are readily available and provide some interesting insights, I'm more interested in syntactic phenomena (e.g., recurring phrases). But in the case of The Simarillion the "reading difficulty" could be beyond even that; I suspect it might be because it doesn't build up suspense the way the traditional narrative of a novel does. Unfortunately, that might be hard to capture in a programmable test.
> countries like Africa

Hopefully a typo. For reference Africa comprises ≈54 countries depending on who's counting and who counts.

But yes, infrastructure will pose a problem. Will it be specifically so for facebook though? The argument should apply equally to competitors.
50 next month, and yes :-), and do cutting edge development still. I'm worried I wont be able to do it when I'm 70
I'm with you, I'm rounding 40 myself, and was not happy for the brief couple years of management.

When filling out a 'secret question' for some site, it ask what your ideal job would be. I didn't even blink, it was: developer.

Do I want to be doing this when I'm 50, hells yea.

If I had trillions of dollars, I would still code. It's who I am, it's what makes me happy. If you don't think you'll like development at 50, then you may have picked the wrong career.
@Jacquesm,
I agree with your FU money concept and I am actively working on that. I think this comment is a byproduct (side-effect?! (-;) of your having achieved FI.

But what you mentioned here is what I would consider "Let them eat cake instead" advice. :)

Not well thought out.

Nostalgia is a very powerful emotion, and besides historical perspectives are based on whatever set of lenses you choose to wear. Actually, our grandparents (even parents) had more time in their lives, more variety in their lives that was completely unrelated to their 9-5 routines, their professional lives were (mostly) on autopilot, so they had more free time to pursue all kinds of hobbies and tinkering, while still working on a daily job! So, yes I am looking at grandparents too, but I chose to wear different lenses.
good memories.

myself, i had a modest user number, a few mentions for my work, posted some book reviews, hosted timothy at my condo a couple of times, even got slashdotted a couple of times (including once to distribute star wars prequel trailers via a grad school server i ran, which should give you an idea of how old i am now). "focused traffic" is hardly an apt description, and we still call it "the slashdot effect."

good times.

thank you. what was always clear is that it was first and foremost a labor of love and interest, and that's a rare thing among the net's high profile sites. that has had a profound impact on the site's long term quality.
Relevant experience of mine. http://honestmusings.wordpress.com/2012/05/13/sales-before-e... .
no one in broadband-happy Western countries, no. In countries where 56k speeds are still the norm, Opera rules the mobile space (in a way, they really are "the cloud browser").

Unfortunately, ruling the low-end is a bad place to be in IT, especially in the fashion-influenced mass-consumer space. No wonder they're trying hard to be acquired at the moment.
I've found this to be useful personally.
http://gskinner.com/RegExr/
Congrats to the awesome folks at ISI for scoring 1st at task 3 and 2nd at task 1! Keep rocking my world.
Dragon Oath, new expansion of content
JS is (unfortunately) the only choice when you target browsers. I don't see any intrinsic advantage that can make it the go-to language.

It's the lack of choice that I find problematic.
> most languages don't seem to have a simple library for parsing data

This is what lex and yacc (etc) are for, but they aren't quite simple. Arguably, XML has largely replaced these for "parsing data", since DTDs and XML Schema are CFGs with some minor restrictions (e.g. 1-unambiguous). In many cases, you don't even need a CFG, just nested lists is enough, so JSON fills that role. For even simpler data, just lists of values, there's csv and unix-style line-based formats (use awk etc for parsing).

Interest in CFG's seems to have decreased dramatically since XML (and later JSON) met the simpler needs it served.
My favorite quote today!
16 Examples of Great Responsive Web Design
Therefore: it is no longer an option to have a responsive website. If you wish not to upset your visitors, allow them to visit a site on their phone that is meant for their phone.
This ain't no vulture fund; and we all know about Argentinian "diplomacy".

This fund invested in Argentina, because it believed in its economy - it went long. Like many other funds who invest in US treasuries, German bunds, JGBs, etc.

We all know the Argentinian government is no example for a well-run government, and this fund is taking a stance (i) against the mal-practice/mis-management of the Argentinian finances, and (ii) not accepting a smash-and-grab of 30 cents on the dollar settlement.

All this fund is doing is collecting its debt. It just happens that one of the assets it is after is pretty unique.

Clarifications:

If a country/company defaults != investors do not automatically agree to settle at e.g. 30c/$ (investors need to agree to a settlement price, and in a large syndicate a minority group of investors will never settle or will settle at a higher price). If an investor doesn't settle, it has every right to claim 100c/$ + interest. Some comments imply otherwise.

Going long is no different when buying at 101 cents on the dollar or 1 cent on the dollar - e.g. Greek 10Y bonds are currently being sold/bought at 20c/$, that is no "vulture activity" but providing liquidity to the market. If there are no buyers the Greek bond (or any other bond for that matter) would technically collapse to zero. Some comments imply otherwise.
+1
Good to see I am not alone with views like these. I agree with you. It is also about where you are doing "programming" too ;-)

See my comments elsewhere.
I don't think this proves a superiority of any algorithm against other. Just that SuperVision team did a great job on task 1 and task 2. I just would add two things: 1) There is a No Free Lunch Theorem (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_free_lunch_theorem) that had been applied to pattern recognition too and that states that there is not a significative difference in performance between most pattern recognition algorithms.

2) There is way more chance to get an increment on performance depending of the choose of the features being used, and that seems to be the case here.
How to choose a bride? What science has to offer?
"900 million human on earth actively uses facebook", is still an impressive number to boast about.
Why Trifacta is teaching humans and data to work together
Ruby (borrowed from Perl and common in many regex impls I believe) has the "x" modifier to ignore whitespace and comments in literal regexes, for example:

str = "2012-10-04T07:20:00"

str =~ /
(\d{4}) # four digit year
-
(\d{2}) # two digit month
-
(\d{2}) # two digit day
T
(\d{2}) # two digit hour
:
(\d{2}) # two digit min
:
(\d{2}) # two digit sec
/x
No it's not. LaTeX is still page-oriented. You can convert it to HTML and other formats but not as well as multi-format markup specifically designed for that purpose.
me/us too
To be fair, just looking to make money doesn't instill one with the desire to make an impact on the world, but just wanting to make an impact on the world would require making money.
Time is broken, we need to fix it
I despised this trend when I was in college and did not know the value of internships either. Most people I knew were outsourcing or buying projects or internship certificates to have more time for what they wanted to do after college - MBA, MS etc.

Me and my friend knew 8051 assembly language before project frenzy started. We wanted to stay away from outsourcing project sellers and build something on our own. There was a senior who'd built a Robotic arm to show it was possible. Our major was in Electronics and communications engineering. We built a GPS vehicle locator by making two GSM phones talk to each other using SMS. It even had a maps front-end in VB.

Nothing I had learnt in College prepared us for what we did in those 3 months. We took printouts of 8051 microcontroller, GPS module, Nokia, Siemens modem datasheets. We spent lot of time researching GPS modules which we could get in Bangalore and after numerous visits to circuit shops, setup a lab at home for soldering and burning microcontroller ROM. We burned code in 8051 ROM like 200+ times and spent the whole time learning soldering, writing modular code in Embedded C, talking to Siemens AT modems. When we finally got SMS response of GPS coordinates, we had 600 lines of Embedded C code. We started writing the client side in VB which was a breeze except for soldering a Nokia phone to COM port. We got the same grades as those who bought their projects, but we had the satisfaction of building something.

College in India is pretty much useless unless you have great peers. I was fortunate to have a liberal education in school where the focus was on learning and not rote memorization. I learnt assembly, gwbasic, C, VB while in school. My friend got a job in Embedded systems industry. I applied for GPS and fleet mgmt software companies but ended up working for a big IT company. I got out of that soon and joined a place where developers are not treated like commodities.
Or a simple RFC6570 parser (URI Template [1]) that supports variable extraction. Variable extraction isn't part of the spec [2], but at least one library implements it [3].

[1] http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6570

[2] http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6570#section-1.4 - "In general, regular expression languages are better suited for variable matching."

[3] https://github.com/sporkmonger/addressable
“H-1B workers may be hired even when a qualified US worker wants the job, and a US worker can be displaced from the job in favor of the foreign worker.” US Department of Labor

The US government and corporations have sold you out as a US CITIZEN. See the proof http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TCbFEgFajGU&;
In India? Its importance is pretty huge.

This is the case with an obvious argument like free speech.

Have a debate on something like civil liberties and rights, or the Aadhar scheme and you will draw blanks.

Or comprehensive and confident arguments against something as basic as superstition.

I'm sure after a series of disasters and a home grown enlightenment movement which grows out of religious adventurism we could learn the same lessons as the west. The question is do we have to?
I enjoy programming and would like to be doing it at 50, but with regard to the software industry itself... not in its current state.

If you want to be able to survive more than 10 years in the software industry, you need to get manager-level clout and full autonomy over your work. That's non-negotiable. This industry destroys you if you don't have those things.

The terrifying thing about the software industry is that if you don't continue to get good work, you decline pretty quickly. Also, I honestly think 90% of what makes some engineers great and most not (once filtering for natural talent has taken place) is past experience: you need a continual stream of high-quality work to become and remain decent at this job, and the good stuff is rare.

The actual work of programming can be a lot better (more interesting, more rewarding) than anything that managers do. The hard part is figuring out a way to be a full-time engineer but retain manager-level clout.

Many engineers think that actually becoming managers will give them what they need to enjoy engineering again, but the problem is that this strategy doesn't work. If you're a manager and your reports figure out that you're taking all the interesting work for yourself and throwing them the scraps, they'll get pissed off and either underperform or leave.
To nitpick at the math: "No free lunch" results are asymptotic in the sense that they necessarily hold over the _entire_ domain of whatever problem you're trying to solve. Obviously, algorithms will and do perform differently over the relatively few inputs (compared to infinity...) that they actually encounter. It's similar to undecidability: just because a problem is generally undecidable doesn't mean you can't compute it for certain subsets of input, and compute it reasonably well (for some definition of reasonable).
I was noting this yesterday in the DollarDollarJS thread ... presumably in the quest for "karma," flaming open-source projects has really gotten popular over the past eight months or so on this website (I think that flaming of startup ideas has always been a feature, however).
A couple of things:

1. Facebook's app isn't pure native today. They simply shifted more of the development to native than was before. LinkedIn does the same thing. "For areas within the app where we anticipate making changes more often, we will continue to utilize HTML5 code, as we can push updates server side without requiring people to download a new version of the app."[1]

2. "Now nobody says Java is slow" - Seriously?

3. "This is like what we saw 30 years ago with the PC, with hundreds of standards and everyone wanting to produce their own PC." - No, it's not. This is a different set of fragmentations. Mainly having to do with OS fragmentation (which didn't exist with Win dominance) and displaying information on a limited canvas.

4. Curious...what motivation does Apple, Samsung, HTC, Nokia, etc have to advance their browser engines? When we talk about "HTML5 maturing" isn't this what we are waiting for?

[1] - https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/under-th...
So, You Don’t Have Any Disabled Users?
Cool idea. This is exactly what I've been looking for. If you've never picked up a duino - do it! It's super fun and it will make you a better developer.
Hi, author here.

First, it's she, not he.

Second, because I hadn't heard about that obvious test at all back then. I never pretended to do a superserious scientific analysis but rather answer to the questions that came to my mind, by using a computer to validate hypothesis.

But many thanks for the pointers & suggestions, though! I was thinking about rebuilding this to make it realtime+interactive so that more than one text could be analysed/visualised, so I'll make sure to introduce the new tests.
US magazine features interactive ad powered by an embedded smartphone
Late reply, sorry. There's some among the data provided to the court. IIRC Apple submitted an internal report done by Samsung, which indicated Galaxy Tabs are often returned because users thought they were buying iPads.
I think that quite a lot people have <50 friends (including the fake users). Those don't use facebook very much - just for messaging. So I don't trust those numbers. I don't think people are being more self ware.
No. If they could make billions of dollars in revenue with just 100 users, that would be fine with investors.
Nokia has (or rather had) Better-Many-Things, and absolutely no idea what to do with them.

They keep cutting trees but there's nobody in the forest to hear them fall, because they put huge signs all around saying "WE DON'T REALLY LIKE CUTTING TREES". A Microsoft (or why not, Facebook) acquisition is basically their only hope at this point, bar miracles.
What they are doing is legal, yeah, but it is pretty much textbook "vulture fund" behavior.
If you look for achievement in programming field you have to plan it for a long term in specific area. Unfortunately many programmers turn to be jack of all trades, working in many things at the same time and without a long term purpose.
How an Intelligence Officer convinced Andreessen Horowitz to invest in FB
Really? That's the direction you took? You realize what Tesla is doing is going to destroy the oil economy - dependency on oil for cars - and practically eliminate the need to pay for re-fueling your car once you own it? Or is it that you just don't believe it?
TomTom releases its navigation app for Android
I'm fifty, and I still enjoy programming, but my interest in incidental complexity -- the details of APIs, say -- isn't what it once was. And the likelihood that I will put in a ton of overtime to meet an arbitrary schedule isn't what it once was either. I'm less interested in the technology than I once was, and more interested in how people are using it to solve problems.
That's also how Path came up the their maximum number of friends you can add: http://service.path.com/customer/portal/articles/659426-why-...
If you're young, be sure to read the responses here very carefully. There are lots of people like me who love what they do at fifty or beyond. Yay!

But of course, this sample has survivor bias. How many people who left the profession in their forties are going to post on HN? How many people who are fifty and hate their jobs are going to post on HN?

I love what I do and try to share that love. But my advice to you is this: Don't pay attention to how much we love our jobs at fifty, pay attention to how we got to be fifty without burning out.
No.

Elliott capital does not work this way. Google them.

They don't go long on anything. They buy debt from funds that did for pennies on the dollar when it doesn't look like that debt will be repaid. They then try to collect on it aggressively and turn a handsome profit in most cases.

It's been a very successful strategy for them - that's how their founder is now a billionaire.
My grandparents would have been very happy with time and energy left over for 'hobbies and tinkering'.
Show HN: a new tool for front end dev
They should apply the Rapgenius magic to Shakespeare. Crowdsourced Cliff Notes++.
So it is about achievements of your paying customers using your technology business's apps you wrote using tools at your hand. Simply put you are happy that you have created something useful to others or there is something more?
I agree, I was expecting some CSS hackery.

But this is nothing more than using CSS for pixels. With that logic you could theoretically create anything.
How to work with Portrait or Landscape mode in Windows Phone 7
Agreed. Compared to the Silmarillion the Lord of the Ring war seems kind of cute. Imagine a thousand balrogs riding on dragons against the elven city Gondolin.